In one early draft, the character who was to become Prince Myshkin is an evil man who commits a series of terrible crimes, including the rape of his adopted sister (Nastasya Filippovna), and who only arrives at goodness by way of his conversion through Christ.

In a letter to Apollon Maykov, Dostoevsky explained that his own desperate circumstances had "forced" him to seize on an idea that he had considered for some time but had been afraid of, feeling himself to be artistically unready for it.

On the journey, Myshkin meets a young man of the merchant class, Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, and is struck by his passionate intensity, particularly in relation to a woman—the dazzling society beauty Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova—with whom he is obsessed.

He readily engages with them and speaks with remarkable candor on a wide variety of subjects—his illness, his impressions of Switzerland, art, philosophy, love, death, the brevity of life, capital punishment, and donkeys.

Among the guests at the party are Totsky, General Epanchin, Ganya, his friend Ptitsyn (Varya's fiancé), and Ferdyshchenko, who, with Nastasya Filippovna's approval, plays the role of cynical buffoon.

Aglaya, however, is more interested in the Prince, and to Myshkin's embarrassment and everyone else's amusement, she recites Pushkin's poem "The Poor Knight" in a reference to his noble efforts to save Nastasya Filippovna.

Nastasya Filippovna again addresses herself to Yevgeny Pavlovich, and in the same jolly tone as before loudly informs him that his uncle—a wealthy and respected old man from whom he is expecting a large inheritance—has shot himself and that a huge sum of government money is missing.

Present are Lebedyev, his daughter Vera, Ippolit, Burdovsky, Kolya, General Ivolgin, Ganya, Ptitsyn, Ferdyshchenko, Keller, and, to Myshkin's surprise, Yevgeny Pavlovich, who has come to ask for his friendship and advice.

Stimulated by Lebedyev's eloquence, everyone engages for some time in intelligent and inebriated disputation on lofty subjects, but the good-humoured atmosphere begins to dissipate when Ippolit suddenly produces a large envelope and announces that it contains an essay he has written which he now intends to read to them.

The essay is a painfully detailed description of the events and thoughts leading him to what he calls his 'final conviction': that suicide is the only possible way to affirm his will in the face of nature's invincible laws, and that consequently he will be shooting himself at sunrise.

Lizaveta Prokofyevna feels it is time to introduce the Prince to their aristocratic circle and a dinner party is arranged for this purpose, to be attended by a number of eminent persons.

Dostoevsky's personal image of Christian faith, formed prior to his philosophical engagement with Orthodoxy but never abandoned, was one that emphasized the human need for belief in the immortality of the soul, and identified Christ with ideals of "beauty, truth, brotherhood and Russia".

The young nihilist Ippolit Terentyev is the character that provides the most coherent articulation of the atheist challenge to Myshkin's worldview, most notably in the long essay 'An Essential Explanation' which he reads to the gathering at the Prince's birthday celebration in part 3 of the novel.

[17][18] Consequently, the inexorable laws of nature appear to Ippolit as something monstrous, particularly in the light of his own approaching death from tuberculosis: "It is as though this painting were the means by which this idea of a dark, brazen and senseless eternal force, to which everything is subordinate, is expressed...

I remember someone taking me by the arm, a candle in his hands, and showing me some sort of enormous and repulsive tarantula, assuring me that this was that same dark, blind and all-powerful creature, and laughing at my indignation.

His unexpected tirade at the Epanchins' dinner party is based in unequivocal assertions that Roman Catholicism is "an unChristian faith", that it preaches the Antichrist, and that its appropriation and distortion of Christ's teaching into a basis for the attainment of political supremacy has given birth to atheism.

[22] The Russian, he claims, not only feels this thirst with great urgency, but is, by virtue of it, particularly susceptible to false faiths:"In our country if a man goes over to Catholicism, he unfailingly becomes a Jesuit, and one of the most clandestine sort, at that; if he becomes an atheist, he will at once begin to demand the eradication of belief in God by coercion, that is, by the sword...

Passionate and idealistic, like 'the Russian' alluded to in the anti-Catholic diatribe, Aglaya struggles with the ennui of middle class mediocrity and hates the moral vacuity of the aristocracy to whom her parents kowtow.

Isolated and sexually exploited by Totsky from the age of sixteen, Nastasya Filippovna has inwardly embraced her social stigmatization as a corrupted 'fallen woman', but this conviction is intimately bound to its opposite—the victimized child's sense of a broken innocence that longs for vindication.

The experience had a profound effect on Dostoevsky, and in Part 1 of The Idiot (written twenty years after the event) the character of Prince Myshkin repeatedly speaks in depth on the subject of capital punishment.

In this description Myshkin takes the contemplation of the condemned man's inward experience of time a step further and asks: what would the mind be experiencing in the last tenth of a second, as it hears the iron blade sliding above?

In the midst of a heated exchange with his nihilist nephew he expresses deep compassion for the soul of the Countess du Barry, who died in terror on the guillotine after pleading for her life with the executioner.

Through his own emergence from a prolonged period on the brink of derangement, unconsciousness and death, the Prince himself has awoken to the joyous wonder of life, and all his words, moral choices and relations with others are guided by this fundamental insight.

Joseph Frank, drawing on the theology of Albert Schweitzer, places the Prince's insight in the context of "the eschatological tension that is the soul of the primitive Christian ethic, whose doctrine of Agape was conceived in the same perspective of the imminent end of time.

Dostoevsky's extemporaneous approach helped facilitate the representation of the actual position of human subjectivity, as an open field of possibility where the will is free at all times, despite the apparent necessity of cause and effect.

The concept suggests an ethos where normal hierarchies, social roles, proper behaviors and assumed truths are subverted in favor of the "joyful relativity" of free participation in the festival.

In this sense, even the author's own ideological positions, when they are expressed through the narrator, or Myshkin, or Lebedyev, "become thoroughly dialogized and enter the great dialogue of the novel on completely equal terms with the other idea-images".

"[68] Leading radical critic Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin approved of Dostoevsky's attempt to depict the genuinely good man, but castigated him for his scurrilous treatment of "the very people whose efforts are directed at the very objective apparently pursued by him... On the one hand there appear characters full of life and truth, but on the other, some kind of mysterious puppets hopping about as though in a dream..."[69] Dostoevsky responded to Maykov's reports of the prevailing 'fantastical' criticisms with an unashamed characterization of his literary philosophy as "fantastic realism", and claimed that it was far more real, taking contemporary developments in Russia in to consideration, than the so-called realism of his detractors, and could even be used to predict future events.

"[71] Typical of the western critics was the introduction to the first French translation which, while praising the energetic style and characterization, notes that "they are enveloped in a fantastic mist and get lost in innumerable digressions.

"[72] Prominent modern critics acknowledge the novel's apparent structural deficiencies, but also point out that the author was aware of them himself, and that they were perhaps a natural consequence of the experimental approach toward the central idea.